Modern day integrated chips comprise millions or billions of semiconductor devices formed on a semiconductor substrate (e.g., silicon). To improve functionality of integrated chips, the semiconductor industry has continually reduced the dimension of semiconductor devices to provide for integrated chips with small, density populated devices. By forming integrated chips having small, densely populated devices, the speed of the semiconductor devices increases as the power consumption of devices decreases. However, as the density of integrated chip devices increases, the failure rate of integrated chips due to contamination also goes up. One cause of such increasing failures is the exposure of a wafer to airborne molecular contaminants (e.g., dust particles in the air).
To minimize integrated chip failure due to contaminants, exposure of an integrated chip to contaminant particles is limited. For example, modern day integrated chips are formed in clean rooms having a low level of environmental pollutants. For example, an ISO 1 cleanroom contains no particles having a size of greater than or equal to 0.5 um (in comparison to ambient air outside, which contains approximately 35,000,000 particles per cubic meter in that size). Integrated chips are also transported between tools in a clean room using closed wafer carriers (e.g., front-opening unified pods) that further decrease exposure of an integrated chip to contaminants.